1. Technical Field
The field relates to determining the geographic location of entities in a communication network.
2. Background Art
Methods of determining the location of network entities are often implemented in wireless networks. Many wireless communications end-user devices, such as mobile telephones and personal digital assistants, have incorporated global positioning system (GPS) devices that enable the user as well as the network to determine the current geographic location of the device to a high degree of accuracy. In wireless cellular telecommunications networks, each end-user device is connected to the network through a cellular base station. The locations of the cellular base stations are generally known through various methods, and therefore the locations of end-user devices that are connected to the network directly through a particular cellular base station can be determined based on the known location of the respective cellular base station, or based on one or more cellular base stations that are within range of the end-user device. Similarly, in many other widely deployed types of wireless networks, such as WIFI, WIMAX and like networks, the locations of base stations that connect end-user devices to the network are known.
While the wireless base station with which an end-user device is currently associated with can determine the location of the end-user device with respect to the coverage area of the base station, other methods, such as triangulation and tri-lateration using multiple base stations with which an end-user device is associated, can yield higher accuracy in location determination.
Some network entities may also utilize Internet Protocol (LP)-based geo location. In LP-based geo location the location of a network entity is determined based on its assigned LP address. For example, a query to a service such as WHOIS can return the approximate location of the subnet having a particular IP address. However, IP-based geo location is error-prone due to several factors. In one aspect, IP-addresses assigned to end-user devices change frequently. In another aspect, the geo-location information that is available based on IP-based services may not be sufficiently accurate. For example, the accuracy achieved by conventional IP-based services are generally at the city-level.
With the increasing deployment of location-based services (LBS), it would be useful to have methods and systems that can determine the geographic location of various networked devices including devices having wired and/or wireless interfaces, devices that are static in the network, and devices that have some level of mobility within one or more communication networks. Therefore, methods and systems to determine the geographic location of various types of networked devices are desired.